Vértó

Vértó (in colloquial language not used official name Red Cross Lake) is a small standing water body in Szeged, in the outer part of Rókus.

Origin of the name

The name Vértó is unofficial and its origin is also obscure. According to Sándor Bálint a nearby slaughterhouse’s flowing blood-colored water painted the lake red, thus the name Vértó arose in popular speech. (Although Bálint mentions it, there is no trace of a slaughterhouse on contemporary maps in this area, the surroundings were only vineyards and orchards until the early 20th century, and the inhabited area’s border was several hundred meters to the south.) The explanation that gas‑factory wastewater painted the lake red also appears repeatedly, but the former Rókus gas plant is 1.2 km away from Vértó, while Búvár Lake and Városgazda Lake lie only 400 and 450 m away, so the introduction of wastewater would have been plausible for those. Instead of the colloquial name, the name Red Cross Lake already appears on maps at the beginning of the 20th century. The lake’s official name was still Red Cross Lake when the residential district surrounding the lake began to be built in the 1970s. During the construction of the district several places near the lake also received the name Vértó. The street running along the lake’s western shore became Vértói út, and likewise the trolleybus terminus established near the lake was named Vértói út. The bus and trolleybus stop at the lake’s southwestern corner also took the Vértó name and, since February 2012, the tram 2 stop also bears this name. While public transport vehicles travelled city‑wide bearing the Vértó name, the official designation received little public exposure. In the city council’s public documents, in the press and in colloquial speech the name Vértó appears, while the name Red Cross Lake has practically fallen into oblivion.

According to some sources, during the 1848-49 war of independence the raiding parties led by the Croatian Ban Jelasics clashed here with the militia gathered in Szeged. The terrifying memory of the devastation left after the battlefield is still preserved today by the nearby Vér-tó, whose name honors the fallen warriors.

The history of the lake

On the first Hungarian military survey maps, Vértó appears only as a small water surface at the junction of the roads leading to Csongrád and Öthalom. At that time the lake is shown as an irregularly shaped formation extending in a southeast–northwest direction. The second military survey of the 1860s shows a similar picture. The third military survey (1869–84) maps depict the lake’s contemporary shape most completely: a roughly triangular water surface that almost entirely fills the area between the roads to Öthalom and Csongrád. On all three military survey maps a weir is marked at the southern tip of the lake. On the 1922 map of the city of Szeged the lake appears as a much larger triangular water surface, extending 800 metres along the Csongrád bypass and widening toward the north. A few surviving photographs from the mid‑20th century show a plant‑covered area bearing traces of material extraction, of which only the smaller part could have been open water. At the beginning of the 20th century Vértó was mentioned in the press as a particularly notorious area. In 1911 newspapers identified the lake, which collected sewage, as a potential source of cholera infection, where animal carcasses thrown in by locals were decomposing. In 1912 the city government decided to fill in Vértó, and the works began in 1913. A larger part of Vértó’s area was filled, while waste continued to be deposited in the remaining basin.

In the second half of the 20th century the lake acquired its final shape. (On the 1960 and 1967 city maps a lake basin larger than a pond is still visible.) In the following years the area around the lake, previously characterized by fruit orchards and small village houses, was replaced by one of Hungary’s largest housing estates. In those decades the panel houses were built on the places once designated as lake basins. The lake finally remained in the area between the outer line of the newly created Rókusi körút and the Ipoly sor, although the eastern part of the basin north of the Körút also fell victim to the construction of a large sledding hill.

From then on this completely regulated shoreline, dredged basin artificial lake functioned as a reservoir: runoff collected from the surrounding housing estates was led here, and at certain times the waters used for drinking water and sewer network flushing were also absorbed by Vértó.

By the end of the 2000s the condition of the lake had deteriorated considerably. Most of the basin was overgrown with vegetation, and due to low water levels caused by a lack of precipitation the lake’s fish population also began to die off; residents of the housing estate regularly complained about the odor spreading in the area. As the lake’s manager, Szegedi Vízmű Zrt. ordered the draining and basin renovation of the lake at the end of 2009. In the autumn of 2009 the drained lake basin was completely dredged, its shore was arranged, and the overgrown aquatic plants were removed.